No. Not always. We are sons of God. God is great and we are small. So we
have the same qualities as God but He is unlimited and we are very small.
So he is completely independent therefore we are also independent, but not
completely... God is supremely independent and we have a little
independence. So we can use our independence to do whatever we want to. We
can serve God or we can serve our selves... But if we serve ourselves we
have to suffer and enjoy the results of our activities... Even the Bible
says, "What you sow so shall you reap." So if we are sinful we sow sinful
seeds in our hearts and in the future we "reap" suffering as the result.
So we cause our own suffering...

Sometimes God makes it hard for His devotees as well. Just look at Lord
Jesus Christ. His life wasn't exactly a bed of roses. There are so many
examples of saintly people suffering in their attempts to tell people
about God... Because generally people don't like it, they want to be God
themselves, so when you tell them there is someone more powerful than
them, someone to whom they should surrender and serve, the get angry...
But what can be done about that?

If a devotee is still attached to material things God may take them all
away from him so he instead becomes a fully surrendered soul... This may
be a little painful. The father sometimes punishes his children, but that
punishment is a sign of His love for them...

>>First of all, it's >>not really a particularly important question (in the large scheme of things) what >>the distance to the stars in question are.

Yes. It's not very important at all.

>>Second, our capability to measure this distance is adequate.

NO! We can't measure it at all. The scientists have a theory that the
distance is related to the red-shift and they can measure the red-shift
then they pop the red-shift into their "distance to the stars" formulae
and come up with a number. But it may not be correct. They don't even
claim it is correct. The assumption [red-shift and distance are related]
may be wrong and/or the formulae may be wrong...

>>Therefore, it is by no means time to expect an emergency >>message from God about the distance to a star.

Yes. I don't think He'd bother coming down here to tell us that!

>>Keep in mind that God is a parent with a lot of responsibilities.

Actually He is not "burdened" by responsibilities. He has all knowledge,
all beauty, all fame, all strength and all renunciation. He is happy in
the Kingdom of God [the spiritual world]. He is with His devotees there.
Most people are in the spiritual world. This material world is only a
small part of the creation of God (about 1/4). The other 3/4 is the
spiritual world... This place is for the rebellious souls [us] who want to
be happy separately from God [Krishna]... We try to become the master here
in the material world, and to a certain extent we can, but everything ends
in frustration. So after being frustrated for many, many births we can see
this material world is not so good after all, and we want to go back home,
back to Godhead.

>ROFL! And what was our Parent doing during Auschwitz? Getting drunk at >the corner saloon while nobody baby-tended? Or do you suppose that the >millions of Jews, Gypsies, etc. and others getting tortured, starved, >murdered, etc, in unspeakable ways, forgot to add in their prayers that >their problems were an "emergency"?

This is nonsense... We sin so we suffer. It's karma. Is the law of nature.
It's the law of God. This world is a place for suffering. It's like a
prison... And the devotees of God "suffer" too at the hands of the
"atheists". But they don't suffer actually, because they know they are not
these material bodies. They are the spirit soul and their business is to
serve Krishna. So they are not disturbed by bodily suffering. Rather they
expect it... If we have a material body THE BODY will suffer... EveryBODY
gets old, everyBODY gets sick and everyBODY dies... But I do not die, I do
not get sick, and I don't get old... IT IS ONLY THE BODY... So if we
understand we are not these material bodies, but the soul within there is
no suffering...

The serious determination to take to spiritual life can only come at the
point of frustration of our material desires and the world we are living
in is designed to simultaneously give us an opportunity to fulfil our
material desires, but to frustrate them at the same time. So we find, in
the Western world, everyone is becoming frustrated. It is our
responsibility in the Krishna consciousness movement to give those
frustrated people the knowledge about what to do after they become
frustrated with material life.

The defect of our Western culture is although people become frustrated
with material life, they have no alternative to it. Our society doesn't
provide a spiritual alternative. So people become frustrated and commit
suicide -- because there is nothing left. If I come to the point where I
am totally frustrated with material life there is no alternative in the
Western world. We have a very big job, the job is to provide that
alternative, to provide the spiritual alternative so when people are
frustrated with material life they can turn to Krishna. This is the
business of the Krishna consciousness movement. I humbly beg that you
please take this Krishna consciousness movement seriously and help in
spreading the knowledge of Krishna to give everybody in the Western world
a chance to understand the real purpose of life. Thank you very much. Hare
Krishna.

"As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood
to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death.
A sober person ls not bewildered by such a change." (Bhagavad-gita 4.13)